


grief lessons

by christinaapplegay, loamvessel



Category: Dead To Me (TV)
Genre: College AU, F/F, Slow Burn, some homophobic language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25046287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/christinaapplegay/pseuds/christinaapplegay, https://archiveofourown.org/users/loamvessel/pseuds/loamvessel
Summary: So maybe she made a point to befriend the girl who lived in 7B because she knew she smoked weed at night. Because maybe she had insomnia and maybe she was sick of being the only one holding it all together, sick of being the model daughter so everyone could pretend everything was normal and her mom wasn’t in the ground, pumped through with formaldehyde in a little wooden box. And maybe she thought doing something crazy like sucking off a relative stranger for weed would definitively prove, both to herself and everyone else, that everything was very much not normal.Except the person who opened the door wasn’t the greasy college boy she expected.College AU bitchessssssssssss
Relationships: Judy Hale/Jen Harding
Comments: 13
Kudos: 113





	grief lessons

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in NYC in the mid 90s, not unlike the Jonah Hill movie.
> 
> It's pretty obvious that Jen and Judy have radically different socioeconomic backgrounds so we had to make some executive decisions to figure out how they'd both end up at the same college--so Judy's on basically a full ride scholarship that covers part of her living expenses (NYC art schools actually do this, at least circa 2016 when I was applying to colleges) and Jen is just regular rich. 
> 
> If you're only reading this for the sex/romance, scroll down to section 3...yr welcome ;-)

So maybe she made a point to befriend the girl who lived in 7B because she knew she smoked weed at night. Because maybe she had insomnia and maybe she was sick of being the only one holding it all together, sick of being the model daughter so everyone could pretend everything was normal and her mom wasn’t in the ground, pumped through with formaldehyde in a little wooden box. And maybe she thought doing something crazy like sucking off a relative stranger for weed would definitively prove, both to herself and everyone else, that everything was very much not normal. 

Except the person who opened the door wasn’t the greasy college boy she expected.

I.

You in art? she asks, with some difficulty in her level of intoxication, gesturing vaguely at the drawings tacked, almost at random, on the wall. Her arm, which normally moves with the exquisite control of a dancer, now flops around like a limp noodle and makes her giggle. 

Bingo, says the girl. She has warm brown eyes and a round, open face, so sincere that Jen imagines her flushed pink skin might glow in the dark. Judy. 

How do you smoke in here without being caught? 

Judy tips her head up at the wall, where a plastic bag hangs, looped tight over what must be the smoke detector. One of the RA’s taught me that, actually. 

You’re kidding. They told you that? 

I was trying to burn incense. I figured it might have other more pertinent applications. She grins, pleased with herself, and takes a deep inhale, her whole body tightening and relaxing to ride out the breath. Maybe it’s the weed acting on her, but Jen somehow becomes conscious of every contour of Judy’s body in a second—the small, delicate set of her lips, the arch of her throat, the expanse of her chest, the unbroken plane of her stomach that disappears into a pair of elephant patterned harem pants. This exquisite machine of her body which swells and relaxes as one. This girl, thinks Jen, is going to make some college boy very, very happy. 

***

Jen knows she’s pretty, because it’s something everyone’s told her since she was a little girl. She knows about the long cornsilk hair, the blue eyes, the way she can possess and unpossess herself like all good dancers do. Girls usually defer to her because of it, or, at least, deflect their malice onto less fortunate victims. Even now, when she’s transformed almost overnight into a spectacular burnout, a bitch in ratty t-shirts who listens to thrash metal and never picks up her clothes off the floor. She’s never really had to worry about impressing people before, especially not boys, who harass her as constantly and casually as if sexual predation was just as involuntary a mechanism in their bodies as the function of liver or lungs. But for some reason she really wants Judy to like her, in a strange, conscious, desperate way that she has not felt for a long time. 

Nights with Judy in her dorm, the salt lamp glowing, incense smouldering in its stand to drown out the smell of more potent herbal remedies, seem to jump out of her otherwise uneventful college education like a full color illustration. She reads up on the art world, eastern medicine, things she thinks Judy might want to ask her about. She listens to the kind of music she thinks Judy would like. She stands paralyzed in the convenience store at three in the morning, trying to figure out what kind of cigarettes artists smoke. She even contemplates giving herself bangs like the ones Judy has, a choppy slash across her forehead that Jen knows for a fact Judy does with kiddie scissors in the coed bathroom. 

She wonders briefly if this fixation, the strange possessiveness, is a form of obsession. There was an aura around Judy, a strange vitality that drew people around her like a blanket, a buzzing network of friends studding her days like jewels. She thought if she managed to stay close to Judy for long enough, to have that energy close to her, infusing every aspect of her life, she might begin to feel real. 

***

I like Judy, she tells Christopher one night, as they cool down after an evening class. 

Who, the stoner girl in 7B? 

She’s not a stoner, Chris. She just smokes recreationally. 

Uh huh. Anyways, I’ve been meaning to tell you—I saw her at one of those gay committee meetings. You know she’s gay? 

No, she says, her mouth suddenly dry. I had no idea. I mean, aren’t those—she pauses, not really wanting to say “gay committee” because she isn’t gay, obviously, but not really wanting to say “LGBT student alliance” because it makes her feel like a narc—meetings open to allies, too? She’s very into, like, activism and stuff. 

No, she’s gay, says Chris. He pauses, reaches across his split to grab the other foot. She like, had a girlfriend and everything. She talked about it. In the meeting. Like, Michelle or something. 

She can feel her mouth making an O. 

Anyways, Chris continues. I just brought it up ‘cause I thought you kind of had a thing for her. 

That’s cute, Chris, but I’m not gay, remember. She hopes the words sound convincing. She has a hard time believing them herself. 

Yeah, yeah, I know, he says, rising, shaking out his muscles. Coffee tomorrow, yeah? I’ll meet you outside the library. 

She nods, but he’s already padding away, lithe and measured on bare feet. 

Alone in the studio, she swivels her hip and feels a slight catch there, where the rotator meets the bone. She’ll have to warm up better next time, do more work on her turnout. She tries not to think about Judy. 

***  
She’s not sure how it’s never come up before. They’re nineteen years old, a pair of not really stoner college girls with not much else to do besides skip class and gossip about people. Jen trash talks everyone. Judy won’t. It’s hard to get her to say a bad word about anyone, even people who are objectively horrible to her, although god knows Jen tries. But somehow the conversation has always steered itself away from sex and its tributaries, and Jen realizes that she likes it better this way, that the thought of Judy with some other person, a man, she thinks, makes her angry. They haven’t even talked about celebrity crushes. The only mention of men between them has been a quick but heated debate on whether or not the guy on the album they always play is actually as short as he looks on the cover. 

Judy’s gay. She plays with the word, looks at herself in the mirror as she mouths it, alone at some infernal hour in the damp, flickering fluorescence of the floor bathroom. She can’t look at herself and make her mouth form the words. She loves gay people. Chris is her best friend. She’s gone to AIDS marches and pride parades. She doesn’t see how being gay should change anything you think about a person. She likes Judy. She has good weed. 

They sit inches apart in Judy’s dorm room bed, the comforter bunched up between their bodies, a small mountain between the tectonic plates of them, a small but ever-present reminder that what they do, this closeness, isn’t anything. She takes the joint and puts her lips over the place Judy’s lips have been. She feels the slight indent, the wetness of the paper from her spit, from Judy’s spit, the scrim of blush tackiness from Judy’s chapstick. She breathes deep, as though she’s trying to keep a piece of Judy inside herself, and when she exhales, she feels it still in the center of her, a quiet, secret kiss.

Judy’s gay. She isn’t. Chris doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. He’s probably spent far too much time around ultra-left big city college kids and forgot that heterosexuals exist, and they’re not just parents and old people. So maybe she grew up close to her mom and maybe her dad could always find something wrong with her and had something to say about it. Maybe men reach up to grab her ass whenever she’s in a public place. Women are safe. Men are dangerous. She thinks that would make anyone, especially a recently bereaved nineteen-year-old, think twice about dating. Chris has never lost a parent. His mom and dad have an inground pool and they love him very much. He has no idea how your sex drive can be impacted by grief. 

She’s not gay. She’s not even bisexual, not even a little. She laughs at the thought because it’s easier than being afraid. 

***

You go through life thinking things happen to everyone else but you, and then things happen to you. 

Her mother was forty-three. She didn’t smoke. She didn’t drink. She didn’t even stay up that late. All things Jen now does, almost like she’s attempting a point she can’t even make. 

When her mother dies, she listens to Judas Priest and cries. She turns up the music as loud as it’ll go, feeling the sonic energy passing into the canals of her body and her body swallowing it whole, like a grounding rod, dead earth. Her parents used to tell her she’d fry her eardrums if she listened to loud music. She likes that idea now--the idea that enough of something as unbodied as music can kill her own flesh. Maybe if she fills her whole life with sound, like the moment of pure serenity in the swell of a passing motorcycle engine, she can kill the part of her that makes the cancer grow. 

She thinks about being nine and how all her friends would laugh whenever someone said breast cancer because they had to say “breast.” And now it’s all any of them say to anyone--the insurance guys, the funeral home, the people at the hospital, to her teachers, her bosses, the relatives she doesn’t even really know, to her friends. My mother has breast cancer. She died of breast cancer. It’s suddenly all she can think of in the middle of the funeral service. She sneaks out of the chapel and laughs to herself in the bathroom, a frenzied, manic laughter that turns into sobs. 

She thinks of her dad when she was young, how they would drive around their neighborhood, following the path of one way streets after one way streets listening to Led Zeppelin. How it stopped, without warning. How one day she was twelve and her dad loved her, and then one day her mom had cancer. Suddenly, there was nothing she could do right. 

It just kind of happened, Jen says. She closes her eyes and leans against the wall of Judy’s dorm room, like sightlessness will make this easier, even though she knows nothing makes this easier. She doesn’t even really know why she’s sharing this. 

She got cancer and dealt with it for years. On and off. She kept getting better and getting sick again. After a while I just started hoping she would just die so we could all move on. I know how that sounds. But jesus. 

God, Jen, I’m so sorry, Judy says, that’s awful. She feels Judy draw closer to her, Judy’s leg coming up almost parallel to her leg, the round, solid cap of her knee against the outside of Jen’s thigh. As though Judy is a conduit, that little moment of touch channelling energy into her body. Giving her strength.

This must be something girls just do. The way their bodies are always touching. 

Yeah, I mean, it fucking sucked, Jen says. I almost tried calling her the other day. She looks at Judy, those dark brown eyes she loves and hates, because they remind her of a labrador retriever, because they make her want to share her secrets. She was a good mom, Jen adds. 

I bet, says Judy. She raised you, didn’t she. She grins, mischievous, and Jen’s internally grateful to her, for giving them both an out for this whole pity party. She hates talking about her feelings almost as much as she hates people feeling sorry for her, and she isn’t even surprised that Judy had known that without having to be told. That she’d understood it intuitively, the way you know where your body is in the dark. That she’d done it while she flirted with her. 

***

Maybe she said it because Judy went first. Because she talked about her heroin addict single mother. 

That’s an interesting name, Judy, she’d said one night. 

You mean it’s a grandma name. 

Well, she’d said, carefully, not wanting to be rude, it’s certainly, um, vintage. 

It’s okay, I know. My mom named me after Saint Jude. The patron saint of lost causes. She’d said this mockingly, enunciating every word, the bitterness surprising in her. Jen suspects the glibness conceals a real hurt. My mom always said I was an impossible baby. But given the fact she was trying to single parent as a heroin addict, I’m not sure what she expected. 

She’d felt like she'd been punched in the gut. Oh, Judy, she’d said, ghosting her hand over the girl’s hair. She wasn’t sure where it came from, this impulse towards intimacy, but it had felt so right in the moment she didn't want to question it. 

Ehh, it’s whatever. She’d give a little shake of her head to dislodge Jen’s fingers, but later, when they’re both high, she’d felt Judy’s chin settle against her shoulder, the proximal flush of heat as Judy’s body nestles against hers. It had been one of the most sublime moments of her life. 

I can say things to you, Jen, she’d said, almost like she couldn’t believe it. I tell you things I’ve never told anyone else. I like that. She’d giggled. I like you. 

I like you too, Judy. She can’t turn her head, or she’ll blush, or burst into tears, or something worse. So she directs her words towards the dormitory ceiling with its orange peel spackle of white paint. You make me feel good. You deserve to be happy. 

Her heart is pounding. She twitches her hand and her fingers press against the inside of Judy’s palm, and she’s not sure which of them does it, but their hands link together, a little warm, a little clammy, and squeeze. 

***

So maybe she meets Judy and realizes she’s gay. That does not mean she likes Judy. Not at all.

I’m gay, Jen says, as the blonde girl in the mirror says it, too. She tests it like she tests how deep her split can go. She focuses on her lips, residual steam from the shower fogging the mirror. Her mouth opens only slightly as she says the word lesbian, like her body knows it’s a big word you have to whisper. She can’t make eye contact with herself. She wonders if lesbian is her word. She wonders if she will ever get called a dyke. She wonders what word she’ll use to yell back. 

There’s always a piece of her that must stay intact. Always an artifact of her body she isn’t allowed to share, like in those freak stories, the gunshot victim who lived for years with the bullet stuck in his skull, or the guy who swallowed a watermelon seed and had a plant actually grow inside. She wonders, sometimes, how her mom would have taken it. Her mom was reserved but not conservative, a transplant from Minnesota who never really got in step with the big city. She’d moved to Brooklyn when she married, thirty years old, too old for reefer madness and free love, and started a family. She wants to think she would still love her. 

Parents can still love their gay kid, she’s seen it in those gay and lesbian chronicles Judy’s shown her. She’s seen it in Out Mag, the copies she has taken to recently reading in the corner of the library. Her dad doesn’t talk to her. She wants to keep it that way. A father who used her mother’s death to sever their relationship. She imagines he wouldn’t take it well. 

Judy’s gay, she reminds herself, a sort of grounding. She has friends and is a blooming artist and loves so fully and entirely it’s close to something Jen doesn’t believe in. Judy’s going to be happy. Judy is happy. And Jen will be, too. Being gay isn’t a fucking death sentence.

***

She’d stayed in the city that summer, instead of going back over the river, working at a dance camp for kids and staying in some college student’s sublet apartment. Her father sends her money every month to help with rent, and she doesn’t feel guilty about it, because she knows this arrangement is far better for both of them than being home, the relief on his voice evident when she suggested it. She’d gone back for the entirety of Christmas break (a mistake) and they’d done nothing but fight, the rooms in the house gaping at her, her mother’s “crafting room” still untouched even then, scraps of fabric everywhere on the ground like a frag grenade, coils of bright yarn unspooling on their perches on the shelves. 

She makes it a week before she wants to call Judy. She looks at the ripped sliver of binder paper as she sits up in bed, the little scrawl at the top corner of the page, surprisingly messy for an artist, that said “Judy” in purple ink. The number she said to call, whenever, if she needs a friend or just someone to talk to. 

Okay, she thinks, she said I could call. It’s not weird. She sits on the couch, looks at the rotary phone on the side table. It’s ten, everyone’s asleep, so she’ll have to be quiet. She dials Judy’s number and she feels like she’s gonna throw up when she hears that Hello? in a voice she only then realized she missed, truly. Like she just needed to hear her to understand how deeply Judy is ingrained into her life now. How one week without her was like a week without a limb. 

Now, she goes to work, eats, sleeps, and calls Judy at night, keening silently towards the tinny sound of the phone speaker. As though closer contact can increase the absorption of Judy into her body. Unable to see Judy, she imagines her, calling on the porch so as not to disturb the residents of the house, in a thin summer floral dress that clings to her body when the wind blows. She imagines her, too vivid and awkward for this small town, coiling into herself like a spring of nervous energy. She can hear it in her voice, a line of tension like a knife’s edge, a shrillness colouring her mellowness. She rarely hears Judy speak this way, can only remember it once, that time she talked about her mom. If Jen was there, she thinks, she could talk to her, calm her down. She would lead Judy out of herself. 

II. 

Neither of them admit it, but they both know something has shifted after that night where Judy told her about her mother. She’d clasped Judy’s hand, which was broad and warm and slightly damp, with ragged cuticles and flecks of blue-green acrylic, and Judy had clasped back. She doesn’t believe in love in college—she knows herself, and she’s much too young and too fucked up emotionally for anything serious—but she certainly has strong feelings for Judy, and a lot of them. 

***

It wasn’t the first dream she’s had about a woman, but it was the first dream about someone she knew, and when it was over, she lay in bed listening to the cars move under her window, face up and guilty, uncomfortably wet in her calvins and her big sweatpants. She’d tried to be positive that summer, had gone to the pride marches, went to a gay movie at the cinema, had even made a very out of character trip to a women’s library, where she’d abandoned her senses and tried to read poetry (even though she never read poetry), gave up, and ended up flipping dispassionately through a couple of magazines. She told herself it was ok to be gay, that it was totally natural, and a thing that lots of women do. But now she is becoming the thing she always feared when she was afraid of being a gay woman, the quiet weirdo who always lusts alone. 

She’d never seen Judy naked before, or even remotely unclothed (although maybe braless once or twice) but in the dream she’d had an imaginary pair of breasts, spliced by her subconscious from the body of some model or actress, their pink tips like stinging jellyfish. She feels far too guilty to even think about touching herself, and when she finally does the next morning, she comes almost instantly, clenching around her hand.

Is this what lesbian means? 

And, more importantly, has Judy had these dreams? 

She had never actively thought of Judy in a sexual context, but she must have, Jen thinks. Judy had known, probably even years before she had, early enough to get a girlfriend who was already out of the picture. Judy would have seen women’s bodies before outside of fantasy—she would know how to touch them. The thought lingers in her mind, even when the kids at camp ask her if she has a boyfriend and she lies, invents a crush on some guy she’d seen a total of three times in the dance building, even when she tells herself, every night before bed: no more dreams. 

III. 

They were sprawled out in the campus lawn, studying, which meant that she was studying, and Judy was reading a self help book on being vegetarian. Judy never did her readings, never did her homework, and almost never went to class, yet she managed to maintain a better than passable average, a fact Jen felt perpetually surprising. Judy insisted she didn’t learn in a classroom format, and got people to explain stuff to her after class. And then I get it, she said. Jen had looked at her in awe. She had never considered Judy to be particularly good at school, intuitive, maybe, with a good design sense, but someone who struggled with book learning. And it turned out she was some kind of savant, someone who could go through college without ever having to actually go to college, while she struggled in vain to comprehend the carefully highlighted notes on her exercise science textbook. 

I’m bored, Judy whines, scrambling up from prone like a bronze, compact cat. She’s trying to improve her tan, wearing nothing but a short tank top over her bare shoulders. Jen turns to look, following the movement, and sees the twin nipples poking through the dark jersey and shivers, visibly, even in the warm September air. After months of imagining Judy’s body in her absence, she was now continuously being confronted by its presence—Judy asking to borrow a tampon, Judy’s arm against her stomach as they lie in bed, sightings of her underwear in the laundry room or on the floor of her dorm, Judy’s hair on her sweatshirt, on her pillow. Judy had come back from the summer looking different, and Jen’s fantasies had had to rapidly adjust. She was tanner, a little bit scruffier, and sported a constellation of half scabbed bug bites from illegal camping trips on a beach along the coast, somewhere between Monterey and Big Sur, near where she’d lived with some aunt in small town California because she couldn’t afford New York rent. She’d managed to give herself a homedone tattoo of a little heart on the outside of her thigh, made with a mirror, a safety pin, and a bottle of India ink she poured in the cut. Jen had almost had a heart attack when Judy had hiked up her skirt to show her that particular souvenir, nearly flashing the inhabitants of Washington square park in the process. She even had the beginnings of a primitive mullet, a hack job delivered with the same gusto and technical inexperience that produced her choppy fringe. 

She liked that Judy had gotten clingier over the summer, as though her body was making up for lost time. That, or a summer of small town isolation helped her forget the importance most people placed on personal space. Now Judy went everywhere she went, always only a few inches away, striding along at a determined clip that somehow makes her seem shorter. She’s learned not to step back without warning, or make any sudden movements, she’s so used to Judy being there. Being in class when they do floor exercises, bounding the length of a studio in a travelling combination, feels odd to her, like she’s missing her shadow. 

Judy even manages to charm her way into the dance building for warm up or cool down, chattering away as Jen tugs on the theraband and flexes her feet. I just do a bun and they think I’m a student, see? In return she stays with Judy as she works in the art building, the only classes she really tries hard for, picking her way gingerly over the paint spackled floor as if the daubs of acrylic and linseed oil constituted live ammunition. They’ve somehow become symbiotic, joined at the hip, and though it’s technically been almost a year since they met, it feels like they’ve always been this way, sliding neatly into proximity of each other like runners coming into pace. 

She comes out to Judy almost by accident. 

They’re walking downtown, having just gotten lunch at their new favourite sandwich place, on their best behaviour for the public, walking far enough apart that no one would suspect anything out of the ordinary is between them, and Judy mentions the bookstore nearby. 

Oh, Good Day Bookstore? She says this immediately, without really thinking, veering suddenly around a pizza box lying in the middle of the sidewalk, and bumping into Judy, who grabs her forearm with a little gasp of surprise. Jen hopes she stays. 

Yeah, says Judy, then, how’d you know that? She says this slowly, like she’s asking a very delicate question, and drops her hand from Jen’s wrist. Jen focuses on the ground in front of her as they walk, realizing only retroactively the magnitude of what she’s just said. It’s a motherfucking gay bookstore, and only gay people go to those things. After months of worrying, she’s basically outed herself without a second thought, weaving carefully through the trash filled street. She feels her face tingle and she knows she’s blushing, her heart pounding, heat washing her cheeks and flushing her neck. 

Well, I walked by it a lot over summer. I went in once. It’s suddenly raining, one of those warm summer showers where the sun stays overhead. 

It’s cute, kinda tacky, she adds, because Judy’s silence is making her nervous. She looks over at Judy, who is very carefully not looking at her. But not in like, a bad way. Just bright colors, I don’t know, they aren’t my thing. You know. 

I do know, says Judy, clearly grateful for a break in the conversation. Well, I wanted to stop in and show you this book they had on Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. I saw it the other day and knew I had to show you. 

She had only mentioned liking Fosse and Verdon once, on one of their long-distance calls to California in what, for her, was the middle of the night, time zones and insomnia making them both temporarily nocturnal. She looks at Judy, who grins back at her with those big brown eyes, her bangs beginning to clump together on her forehead, dark grass clippings in the warm rain. 

I can’t believe no one knows she’s the real reason why Chicago even happened, Judy says. 

Jen smirks says, I know, it’s kinda fucked up. It’s like he took all the credit. Maybe they shouldn’t go inside with wet hair, wet clothes, but when they reach the shop, after a small conversation about how Judy reveals that she’s been kind of obsessed with Gwen Verdon ever since Jen mentioned her, how she’s gotta be the most talented Broadway dancer ever – god, her legs, Judy says, and Jen says, oh, I fucking know – they share a look, eye contact that Jen is finding much easier to make, and she says, Let’s go in.

***

She’d never really considered making a move on Judy—all her past experiences have been with men, teenage boys who kind of glommed onto her, requiring nothing but a few smiles and a lack of overt, pointed rejection. Not that boys really cared how many times you said no. But talking to women meant actually approaching them, something she would probably avoid on principle, even if she knew how to. And Judy probably didn’t even know she was gay. So for almost a year they’d moved carefully around each other, and it had taken her kind of coming out, that casual admission that wasn’t really an admission that day outside the bookstore to clarify something crucial about the casual tactility that exists between them, transposing onto their friendship the quiet possibility of desire. 

If there had been a shift between them before, what’s changed between them now is a groundswell, a total resettling of the earth. She feels it, the way animals sense a coming storm, that small hitch, a change in sea level. She feels it in the way Judy moves differently around her now, the way she’ll sometimes catch her staring out of the corner of her eye when she thinks Jen’s turned away. But, unlike a storm, she doesn’t think it’ll be a bad thing when it breaks.

On the subway, Judy wraps her hand around Jen’s. They hold onto the bar together. They sway opposite, then into one another. Judy giggles when their hips touch. Jen thinks, maybe Judy likes me. She doesn’t wanna give herself too much credit. Judy likes eye contact. She always holds it so well. Jen compares it to when you’re practicing for a competition, how teacher after teacher year after year says to make eye contact with those judges when on stage. Make them watch you. And it works—everyone likes Judy. Everyone wants to be around her. But deep down Jen knows that the thing that exists between her and Judy is different somehow. Judy doesn’t look at anyone else the way she looks at Jen. She doesn’t stand this close, or flush when their bodies press together. What they have is special, something heart-deep, something that shakes the earth. 

***

Judy had kissed her. Judy’s room in the new apartment was a dim little place, the one window mostly blocked by the rattling of a geriatric air conditioning unit, the walls a clutch of sketches, movie posters, and a smattering of Christmas lights slung loosely over an expensive looking wall tapestry that she’s pretty sure Judy rescued from a SoHo dumpster. 

Judy had kissed her there, in that room. She’d leaned over and pressed her mouth to Jen’s, almost curious, like she’d wanted to see what Jen would do. Her red mouth was a hot jewel, so warm and sweet that Jen forgot everything around her, even the sound of the air conditioning, even the smell of a room that, despite Judy’s best aromatherapeutic efforts, smelled and probably would continue to smell like mothballs. Desire surged in her stomach like a hot drop as she reached up to twine her fingers in Judy’s hair. When they pulled away, and she felt Judy’s breath against her mouth, quick little exhales, those brown eyes huge. Her Judy, who in about nine months had grown to become an extension of her body. She’d never thought kissing could feel that good. 

It amused her that Judy still wore the same flavour of chapstick she remembered from months ago, when they’d shared a joint and she’d noticed the translucent pink smudge. It tracked that Judy was faithful even to her cosmetics. 

She had to restrain herself from ripping Judy’s clothes off, and managed it with a level of self possession she thought was admirable for the fact she had a hot, roving bundle of girl moving in her arms. Judy’s breasts were hot and soft under her hands, braless again in her big t-shirt, the nipples tensing under her fingers in a way that made her feel uncomfortably male and prepubescent, and she had to remind herself that this was Judy, that she had kissed Jen first, and that she clarified, verbally and nonverbally, that she wanted this.

Judy touched her and she gasped and cried a little and felt guilty for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, even though everything between them had been expressly consensual, even verging on timidity. She had expected Judy to be some kind of sex wizard, someone who would touch her body once and understand intimately, but Judy was only a little bit more adept than she was, a fact that comforted her immensely, freeing her from the embarrassment of wearing laundry day underwear. The discovery that Judy was as wet for her as she was for Judy was mildly shocking, and filled her with something close as close to religion as she’d ever gotten. 

After they’d gotten shawarma from a food cart, Judy had leant her a toothbrush, and they’d sat in bed smoking, half naked and touching each other as Bob Dylan spun lazy on the record player. Once again she took the joint from Judy and put her lips against the wet spot where Judy’s mouth had been and drew the smoke inside, an act she thought had a kind of poetic symmetry to it when executed with Judy’s bare leg slung over her own naked hip. She’d slept well that night, a long, deep dreamless sleep, the first of its kind she remembers in a very, very long time. 

*** 

Chris has the good grace to not even say I told you so. He just grins at her, and maybe winks a little, and says: does this mean you’ll come to gay committee meetings too, skittering a little to avoid her retaliating elbow. 

They’re walking home after rehearsal, and she feels shockingly present in herself, her young, strong body. Her mother’s death was the product of a genetic curse, an inborn predisposition whose shadow haunted her own blood. Her mother’s dead. Her mother had cancer. She might get cancer one day. And she’s gay. And she didn’t die, and the world didn’t grind to a halt on its axis, the way it had when her mother had said it does the first time: I have cancer. 

She’s beginning to realize that all of these things can coexist in herself like a deck of cards. The knowledge ebb comes slowly, ebbs and recedes, but sometimes, laughing with Chris or kissing Judy, she feels the world click into place, the quiet rightness of it. 

Walking home with Chris that day, there’d been a daytime moon, the face a thin pearl lounging casually in the blue October sky. Her mom had called the daytime moon “God’s eye,” said it meant her dead grandparents were watching her from heaven. Jen had eschewed Catholicism about the same time she’d got tired of Santa and the Easter bunny, but it seems fitting now, like something greater than herself. 

I’m happy, mom, she thinks. She feels more than a little stupid, but she still tips her head up to the sky, in a little nod that might be recognition. 

Maybe the moon winks.


End file.
